


The Quiet Life

by Strange_Kaon



Category: Overlord - Maruyama Kugane & Related Fandoms
Genre: Action, Action/Adventure, Adventure, Eventual Relationships, Fantasy, Gen, How Do I Tag, My First Fanfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-03-05 12:56:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18829099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Strange_Kaon/pseuds/Strange_Kaon
Summary: There are many ways to enjoy a game. For Honoko, known in YGGDRASIL as CookieAndCream, it was essentially a indulgence after a busy day. Like a piece of chocolate after work. But you can't live on chocolate alone, and when the game becomes reality, she finds herself far more concerned with just building a new everyday life for herself than with frivolous adventures or over-complicated grand plans.Unfortunately, she's a stranger in a strange land, struggling with psychological changes and new instincts. A enemy of the state by default, thanks to her race, and a living weapon of mass destruction thanks to her abilities. She just wants a few moments of calm to stabilize and adjust, but the prompt arrival of a certain bumbling undead and his fanatically loyal entourage promises anything but. In times of upheval like these, normalcy is beyond the reach of mere mortals.Of course, she is so much more than mortal these days.





	1. Arrival

The nine-tailed foxwoman listened as the titanic clock below her feet pounded out the seconds. So this was it. The last moments of YGGDRASIL. Honoko had taken the whole day off from work, to celebrate its passing. As the user CookiesAndCream, She’d done everything worth doing in these past 30 or so hours. ganking, reverse ganking, plain and honest PvP,  Arena fights, exploring, dungeon raids, and more, with whatever friends were willing to come online. She’d reminisced on how much the game had changed over the years, and lamented that she could swear there was a second wave of popularity on the horizon, what with the free spread of reliable information as the game died changing the community and the new player experience. She’d even started streaming her exploits, a habit that would be essentially suicidal back in the old days.

 

But one by one, her friends logged out. Some had jobs in the morning, starting almost criminally early. Others just didn’t want to have to watch the thing that had come to mean so much to them die. Cookie stayed on to the very last, though. It had been too much of a ride to not see it off. From her days as a infiltrator for the Three Burning Eyes, then escaping their destruction and joining the 2ch Alliance. Rising to lead the 34th Legion, the PvPing elite, Gank Train. Earning the title of World Guardian. Finally, at 23:55, she had climbed the Grand Clocktower standing miles above Niðavellir’s Golden City, and watched the clouds of steam and fog belched by the strange mishmash of steampunk, Western, and even pirate-themed buildings in YGGDRASIL’s most technological city. 

 

She’d always felt nearly as real in here as she ever had in the real world. It had always been here that she’d been able to work through whatever was holding her back in the real world. Friends here would always be willing to comfort her when reality got her down. She heard the steady thud-thud, of the clock’s massive mechanisms ticking under her feet. Until, suddenly she didn’t. She’d blinked, and found herself in a forest.

 

Her first thought was to her safety. She glanced around frantically, concern rapidly growing as she noticed the absence of her HUD.  Some sort of last-second attack by some bored guild or player? A rollback of the shutdown or just instability before everything went down for good? But those thoughts didn’t last long.

 

She’d noticed something more was wrong than just the teleport in moments. She couldn't remember anything being this _loud_ before. In any normal circumstance, the din around her should have brought her to her knees, but now, it seemed she could hear everything at once, with equal perfect clarity. She could pick out even the tiniest noise within hundreds of meters,  and locate it with a thought.

 

Her smell had changed as well. She could smell a group of about 20 human soldiers approaching from the northeast. The oily, slightly harsh, smell of enchanted steel plate, the scent of woodglue on arrows, and the strangely pine-like aroma of mythril. It was worth noting, that VR could not simulate smell. It bypassed the centers of the brain that the headset could target. So, how could she smell anything at all? To say nothing of pining down a direction, and attributing the scent to a specific nonexistent metal in a instant?

 

She could taste their sweat as if it was on her tongue, salty but not bitter paired with dried blood. A recent fight, but not so recent they hadn’t recovered fully. Fresh blood from the few that had been hurt. They tasted... weak. Diluted. Low HP? Again, VR was strictly a 4-sense system: Sight, Sound, Touch (to a certain degree), and Proprioception (the sense responsible for knowing where your body was in space). This wasn’t an software problem. The physical hardware just didn’t exist. And even if it did, at best VR was indistinguishable from reality. This... This was so much _more._ Even if the shutdown had been some ill-advised joke, and she’d been transferred to some sort of YGGDRASIL 2, this couldn’t be happening. She wanted to panic.

 

But she didn’t. Not exactly. She felt the rush of adrenaline scream through her blood, but there was none of the paranoia, none of the fear that came with panic. In its place, a icy calm. Like how she felt before a raid. Like she imagined she would feel, if she really was a legendary warrior, rather than just someone pretending to be one. She felt the hairs on her neck raise, and noticed her tails coiling back, taut and ready to strike. Her spell lexicon flickered through her thoughts.

 

Wait, her spell lexicon? Could she maybe...

She drew her hand back. [Destabilized Gate Talisman]! Space warped and twisted, as, with a roar of wind, and crackle of arcane energies, some sort of tube of open air opened where there was once nothing at all, the sudden appearance of space distorting the objects around it into long, strange streaks, and shimmers. As a tree whose trunk had been bent into a paper-thin crescent began to fall into the distortion, only to be more and more twisted, it became clear this was so much more than a mere optical effect. Finaly, with a thunderous boom, the world snapped back, the resulting implosion sending fragments of tree flying everywhere. 

 

“Haha... HAHAHA! HOLY SHIT!” She jumped up and down in pure excitement, concerns forgotten with the realization that she could apparently now cast REAL MAGIC. Then, after a moment’s thought, she jumped again. Higher this time. “WHEEEEE!” Her abilities were exactly what they had been in the game, but VR had always had a bit of trouble with the subtleties of sensation. Her setup couldn't replicate the feeling of wind and leaves slightly deforming her cheeks and whipping across her skin, as she shot up into the leafy canopy above. the slight tension she felt as her muscles and tendons instinctively took her through a series of increasingly acrobatic stunts was new to her, and she wondered at it as she flowed around great boughs, and past branches of the huge trees without disturbing a single one. The wind snapped at the hair on her head and on her tails, as she took one final leap,  flinging herself past the treetops, and high into the sky.

For just a moment she hung there, suspended easily two hundred meters in the air. She couldn’t help but gasp. Her vision had been enhanced too, but what was more breathtaking was all that there was to see. The sky was the deepest blue, practically the same shade as a flawless lapis lazuli stone. Nothing like ashy shades of gray, brown, and yellow she had known in her world. The forest stretched out beneath her, a sea of green. To both sides, rose majestic, rocky mountains. She could see all the way to where the curve of the earth took the ground out of sight. Plains, past the forest. And past that, a sliver of ocean, just barely visible.

 

Then gravity reasserted itself, and she fell. She whisked back through the branches silently, somehow ending a fall of more than 250 meters with little more than a quiet crunch of leaves. Where was she? Was she even still on earth? She didn’t think anywhere had skies like that anymore.

 

what was she, for that matter. It was fairly obvious that she was no longer entirely human. Her brief jaunt to the sky made that perfectly clear.  If she was her YGGDRASIL character, she was a Extreme Evil-aligned Kitsune Tenko Ninja/Miko hybrid. A very expensive build, both in game currency, and real world dollars. Also a build that could easily match both the best DPS and Surveillance builds in the game if handled with skill. On top of that, she was an World Guardian, and one of the few individuals known to hold a world item.

 

If all that was true, what was she supposed to do with her newfound power then?  Was she supposed to just keep doing quests and PvPing and farming like she did in the game? Was she supposed to become some sort of epic hero, and do something like, she didn’t know, defeat the “Lord of Death” or whatever? She certainly didn’t want to risk her skin. No telling whether respawning still worked. And honestly the adventuring life didn’t really seem like it would be the most fun, if she had to live it 24/7.

 

While Honoko was stuck in this conundrum, somewhere off to her left, the little group of soldiers had apparently heard the sound of [Unstable Wormhole], and were approaching her. One of them, seemingly some low-leveled ranger, had pulled ahead of the group, and seemed to be trying to hide in a nearby tree. Probably trying. Maybe? Well, he wasn’t trying very hard, in any case. Beyond basic invisibility, it seems he was just trying to move slowly and quietly. Of course, she could see through invisibility, hear his heartbeat, and clearly smell that he hadn’t bathed for days, so that wasn’t going great for them. “Hey, uh, are you going to come down here, or do you want me to meet you up there?” She called out.

 

The man gasped. In one smooth motion, he pulled out his bow, and nocked an arrow. “Keep your distance, beast!”

 

Honoko’s new senses told her she could grab anything he fired right out of the air. Even if he could hit her, he wouldn’t be able to overcome her resistances. But despite this, much of her mind was still going “pointy sharp thing bad” she’d really rather not have to test those theories. “Hey, relax dude. My name’s CookieAndCream, and-” She stopped, and thought for a second. What if this was realy another world? What if there was no way back? Was she going to go by her username here? What if she had that on her ID? Would she have to write [2ch] CookieAndCream {Guardian} on her tax returns?! “Actually, no, no that’s a terrible idea. Call me Honoko. Uh, where am I?” Until she understood the situation better, it was certainly best to take all this seriously.

 

The man ignored her question completely. “How did you see through my invisibility!?” He looked like a fairly stereotypical fantasy ranger. Green cloak, leather armor, covered with small, articulated plates of mythril (and from here, she could see its bluish tint, more than just “knowing”), short-cropped hair, and a recurve bow, with a handful of glowing runes carved into it. Basic stuff. He really did seem like he was in the mid-twenties, level wise.

 

Honoko smiled politely “Well, that’s easy. Invisibility’s just a flat PER penalty, so since I have-”

 

“This is too much talk.” The man growled. “Your kind only deserves death!” He loosed the arrow. Honoko was moving long before that, though. She still wasn’t clear on what was going on, or even if this was real. It could even be some sort of fever dream, for all she knew right now. But she sure wasn’t going to just stand here and take hits.

 

She lept, covering the twenty or so meters between them in the time it took for the arrow to clear his bow. She landed further along the same branch the man stood on. He glanced frantically around the clearing, now below both of them. "Damn, that thing is fast! Where'd it go!" He muttered to himself.

 

“That 'thing' is over here, you asshat! What the hell is wrong with you!”, she said, beginning to advance on him. As she did, she saw a strange shiver run through him. He spun towards her. She could see strange tendrils of light starting to form under his skin. A buff? Some sort of skill? Why did it feel like he was being hurt by them, then?

 

“What are-” the man started. “Are... AR-ARRAAAAGGGHHHH!” His question morphed into a scream, as a white flame burst out his mouth and eyes. The white tendrils of light were dancing under his skin now, eating away at him, like he was made of smouldering paper. He collapsed off the tree, and fell to the ground, splattering into a mess of blood, meat, and ash.

 

Honoko just stood on the branch, thoroughly confused and disgusted for a moment, before it hit her. Her passives. One of them added holy damage to her strikes, but also did a bit of chip damage to anything within a certain radius of her. Chip damage for her, lethal for a level 20. She’d murdered him. Gruesomely.

 

...She should be feeling way worse about this.

 

She hopped down from the tree, and poked at the body. For some strange reason, she was completely unbothered by her kill. She just murdered someone, and didn’t feel a thing. Even if she hadn’t meant to, she should at least be feeling revulsion looking at the corpse, right? If anything, she felt... Hungry? The smell of well-cooked meat wafted off the corpse. Her mouth watered. She hadn’t eaten anything pretty much all day, thanks to her gaming marathon, so she was starving. Maybe just-

 

Nope. Nope nope nope. She stood, pulled a acid kunai out of her inventory, dropped it on the corpse, and walked away as the temptation was turned into a unappetizing chemical slurry. She wasn’t going to eat people. Maybe the word cannibal didn’t exactly apply, but the whole thing just seemed incredibly disrespectful.

 

Without really having anything to judge it off of, it was awfully hard to judge whether the party of soldiers had really noticed her yet. She’d been able to follow them for kilometers, and they were well within the radius that most level 100 builds in YGGDRASIL would have a pretty accurate picture of what was going on. They were creeping forwards, arms at the ready, but didn’t seem to have noticed her specifically. She glanced back down at the puddle of armor, equipment, and bubbling goop that used to be the ranger. Well, she guessed she’d just have to hope they didn’t bring up his absence, or that they didn’t really like the guy. After a moment, she was standing in the tall grass in a clearing, smiling and waving to a suspicious and disbelieving cluster of heavily armed warriors. “Hey! What’s up? Where am I?”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may have noticed something missing here. You might even be thinking "Hey, the only thing from Overlord Cannon in there is the name of the game! I came here for a fanfic, not something completely unrelated!"  
> But before you choose to deprive me of that sweet, sweet existential validation, let me explain. Honoko, as of this part of the story, shares nothing in common with AOG. That will change, but first I want time to set up, and establish Honoko as a complex character so she can interact with, and bounce off of the Nazarick gang's cast of crazy zealots (and, of course, pappa bones himself) in a interesting way. After all, the only difference between a beloved MC and a Mary Sue is depth of character. I plan to bring the main cast in around chapter 3 or 4, and from there on, they'll have more and more interaction as the ways they impact the world, and therefore Honoko, begin compounding on each other.  
> Many of my other works are completely original, and I'd like to think that I have practiced enough to do this sort of thing well, but some people do just loathe fanfics that are too disconnected from the original work. This is primarily written for their benefit. 
> 
> As for the rest of you, I feed on your hopes and dreams. Leave comments, and you won't find me hidden under your bed, waiting for the darkest hour of the night, when I slip out and feast on your unsuspecting mind. Positive comments appreciated, constructive criticisim appreciated more, Death threats and personal insults tolerated if sufficiently creative.


	2. Power Scaling

Keel ran. He ran without grace, without care. He couldn’t resist a glance behind him, half expecting the abominable creature that was ripping those horrifying screams out of Skute to be right behind him. “Don’t look back!” the girl beside him shouted. She was Amphi. Their second best ranger, and the most beautiful girl in the world, he was sure. And in her bravery, she looked even prettier. She pulled him out of the way of smacking his face into a tree. “Just look forward! Even if she’s right behind us, all we can do is run!” He blinked the tears of fear out his eyes, and nodded. How had it all gone so wrong?!

 

Keel had always been a coward. He was quite talented with magic, but ever since losing his village to the advancing beastman armies he had wanted nothing more than to just be safe. He’d thought he’d found safety. After all, they said that General Hogan Sergio Macule Oriculus was the strongest of all the generals, in pure martial strength, at least. He was supposed to have dragon blood in his veins, just like Her Majesty the Queen. They had said that his army of sixty could best sixty thousand beastmen.

 

He’d almost believed it too. Even come to accept that he belonged in their number. That maybe he could live without the fear that had plagued him all these years. Then he heard Amphi’s master scream for just a moment, before the forest had fallen far too quiet. That man also was the only survivor of his village, and had taught Keel to draw his strength from the fear that another child would experience the hell that they had each gone through. He had wanted to run right there, but he had pushed that down as weakness. He was sure that his friends could protect him. He knew that he had to stand by Amphi’s side.

 

Maybe if he had run right then, he’d be safe. Maybe that would have been good enough. He heard someone begging for help in the distance. Sounded like one of their barbarians. It cut off abruptly.

 

General Macule, or Hogan, as he insisted them calling him, had put them all on alert, and they’d crept forward slowly. They had heard her before they’d seen her. A loud call: “Heeey!! What’s up!!” Keel had frantically searched the forest, before seeing the silhouette of a woman, standing in what seemed to be a small clearing, waving.

 

The general didn’t take his eyes off the woman. “Amphi, Skute. Do you sense anything out of the ordinary?” The ranger and rogue each replied in the negative. “ Hm. Sure I don’t have to tell you how much this smells like ambush. Two teams. Flank wide. Amphi, take Placo, Skute take Gano. See anything, signal first, then distract. We’ll be right behind you.” They both nodded, and took off, each followed by one of the monk brothers. “Everyone else, fall into formation.”

 

Keel had taken his position in the back lines with the other spellcasters, beside Mrs. Tasha the sorceress. She smiled down at him motherly.  As short as he was, he didn’t have the best view of the action. The sun at the general and the strange woman’s back, rendered them featureless silhouettes. But he heard what unfolded.

 

“What a surprise, “ the general had said, “To meet such a pretty lady out here in the middle of a battlefield.”

 

The woman had seemed taken aback by this. “...Yeah. A battlefield? Who’s fighting?”

 

“Hmm. Beastmen and humans.”

“Oh. Uh, well, I’m not really interested in participating in a low-level conflict like this, so if you could just point me in the direction of the nearest city, I’ll be on my way.”

 

“Well, I can’t do that right now. See, I would be remiss in my duty as one of Her Majesty's soldiers if I let a powerful enemy past me. And I can tell you’re quite a threat.”

 

“Well, fine then. Where are the beastmen? I’ll go bug them, I guess.”

 

“Hm, can’t really allow that either. As I said, I can tell you’re a threat, and I can hardly let you join their forces. For all I know, you’re on your way back from something deep in our territory, carrying valuable items, or information. The best I can offer is to escort you back to our camp, so we can have a chance to explain things to our superiors, and let them work things out from there.”

 

“Wait, did you just make me your prisoner?”

 

“If it comes to that, yes.” The General’s armor clanked as he sunk into a fighting stance.

 

“So, are you and your buddies hiding your levels, or are you just suicidal?” Her voice seemed more excited than afraid. “Actually, how about this. I’ve got a bunch of spells and skills I need to test. I’ll give you the first shot.”

 

The general frowned. “Very well.” There was a flash of motion, and a screech of metal. The General had swung his ax, as fast as a thunderbolt. It struck nothing but earth. woman had moved, stepped right up to the General, and had run him clean through. The silhouette of the weapon that he could see from his poor viewpoint didn’t look like a sword, and a spear would have been obvious, had she been carrying one.  The shape was familiar. He’d seen it somewhere, but where?

 

Mrs. Tasha made a short scream before covering her mouth in horror. “Sh-She stuck her hand straight through his chest. By the gods!” That’s what it was. A hand. He hadn’t thought of it, because impaling the general, through his enchanted adamantite armor barehanded was simply impossible.

 

“Re-regroup!” Screamed the General’s second in charge. ”Mages fire, and swordsmen charge on my mark! Mages!”

 

Nobody needed to be told twice.

“[Iceball]!”

“[Acid Shot]!”

“[Maximize magic, Shockwave]!”

“[Holy Ray]!”

 

All of the spells thrown were powerful third and fourth tier spells. Nobody was holding back, after watching the general die in one movement, and the projectiles converged on their target as one. The woman's hand shimmered, and in one swipe, she backhanded the spells into their front lines.

 

“Stand firm! Swordsmen! To-ghk!” Nine soldiers, including the second in command, were run through with the fox tails protruding from the woman’s back.

 

“[Titan slash]” What was left of the frontlines collapsed in a shower of gore. It was then that people started running. Not that it saved them. In bursts and bunches, she would appear out of nowhere, and people would die. Sometimes, he would see it out of the corner of his eye, people running alongside him vanishing in a blur of red and white and black. Sometimes he would just hear the screams.

 

He saw Gano scrambling back towards him, covered in blood, and clutching a shattered arm. The monk brothers were far faster than he was, and had a head start. It hadn’t saved them. A thrown blade hit his head, and he simply vanished. Sometimes, he would hear it, the desperate final screams, as people made their last stands. He heard Mrs. Tasha’s voice filled with panic: “[Grand Fireball!]”, followed by a huge explosion. “How are you- No, No please! I-” Then, an even louder detonation.

 

He’d run across Amphi, and she’d joined him, as they’d ripped through the brush. The forest was silent now. Their movements were the only sound he could hear. It had been too long. The screams had come so fast, it as if the beastwoman was everywhere at once. There was no way she was taking this long to catch up. They ran until Keel couldn’t do it anymore. He fell to his knees, gasping for breath. Amphi pulled at him. “Come on, we have to keep going! We have to warn someone!” He wanted to, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even stand or speak right now.

 

“I have a stamina potion here somewhere. Just hang on, okay? We’ll make it together!” She fumbled with her bag.

 

A voice sounded on his other side. “Ahem.” There she stood, leaning casually against a tree maybe three meters away. The woman who had killed everyone.

 

Amphi grit her teeth, and drew her short-sword. “Sure took your time getting to us, huh? Getting tired?”

 

“No, actually. I’ve been following you since your buddy Keel there nearly ran into a tree about a mile back. You just suck at spotting things, I think.”

 

She was radiant. Even as Amphi stood her down, looking more beautiful than he had ever seen her, this woman surpassed her easily.

 

She wore a short dress, a Quipao, if he remembered correctly. They weren’t unknown on the streets of the capitol, but were more popular a little further north.

 

Hers, though, was finer than anything he had ever seen. It was blacker than the darkest velvet, edged with gold, and the white patterns covering it formed strange, slowly shifting fractal shapes. It clung closely to her slender body. Her skin was a coca brown, flawless and smooth. Her hair and tails were a brilliant white. Her eyes were a solid black, except the irises, which were nearly metallic gold.

 

Everything about her was inhuman. Her beauty, her grace, and her unholy power. “You know, I didn’t want to do this. Honestly, it was a lot more fun than I was expecting it to be, but I ran out of new things to try about halfway through. At that point, it was just picking on weaklings. I’ve never found that particularly entertaining.”

 

"We're no weaklings! We're the best of the best, Hogan's heroes!"

 

The woman smirked. "Seriously? That's what you're called? That’s some serious name cringe right there. Well, whatever let's wrap this up." She stepped forward.

 

"Stay back! I won't let you hurt him!”  Amphi shook, but she stood her ground.

 

Keel struggled to his feet. “Amphi...”. She turned to look at him. His stamina was depleted, but he still had most of his mana. He could cast one 5th tier spell, by using [Over Magic]. The only one he knew. “I’m so sorry. [Over Magic! Teleportation!]” The last thing he saw of her was her expression of betrayal. He re-materialized elsewhere. If he was lucky, he could run and hide somewhere before the woman finished with Amphi. He was scum. Anybody would have stayed, and died beside her, but he couldn’t. But he’d made his choice. In the end, after all these years and all he had been through, he hadn’t changed after all. He was still nothing but a coward. His eyes started to fill with tears, and he began to turn away from where, somewhere in the distance, Amphi was undoubtedly experiencing her last moments.

 

Then, he heard a strange, meaty thunk, and a brief stabbing pain. A throwing knife, attached to a long wire, was embedded in his side. The design was the same as the one that had evaporated Gano. The wire snapped taught, and he found himself yanked violently backwards, pulled through brambles, lashed by branches, as he was dragged across the forest floor. He hit a tree, and screamed as his shoulder shattered. Just when he was sure he couldn’t take a second more, his flight came to a sudden stop. Right at the end of the monstrous woman’s arm. He looked down, to see the hilt of a sword protruding from his stomach.

 

Then, he died.

 

As the last of Keel’s memories flowed into Honoko through her world item, {Mistilteinn Blade} she shook her head slightly. The experience seemed to take no time at all, but it certainly surprised her. In the game, the sword gradually gathered a admin-level report on her opponent, and could use that data to improve its damage. Apparently, wherever she was now the process meant seeing your target’s life flash before your eyes. The fact that he had died in one hit, so all the information tried to flow in at once was not helping.

 

He’d abandoned her. He’d been so scared shitless he’d just left his crush to die. “Gah. Who does that?” She muttered. She looked up at the girl, still trembling in front of her. Honestly, she almost felt sorry for her. She looked like she was going to wet herself.

 

“Hey, you okay? Seems like you guys had a bit of a thing. I guess I’d be more judicious with the way I’d... handled some of that if I’d known.” In hindsight, it was blatantly obvious, even for the incredibly short time she’d been following them. She hadn’t really been paying attention, and now she’d destroyed the girl’s relationship.

 

Apparently, Amphi hadn’t been lying when she’d declared this pile of low-leveled garbage “the best”. At the very least, Keel’s memories corroborated her story. Which meant there was nothing even close to being a challenge to her. Yeah, she definitely couldn’t live here like she was still playing YGGDRASIL. What she’d really loved about the game, besides the friends and community she’d made, is the way that it handled 1-on-1 combat. Even at the highest skill levels, lone-wolfing was still a valid tactic. Unlike many other MMOs, a truly skilled solo player who was well-buffed, well equipped, had sufficient resources, and understood their opponents could match a whole party. Or get curb-stomped and lose big. The rush of a challenge was what kept her coming back. She wasn’t going to find that here, if level 20 was a legendary hero.

 

“I don’t know for sure, but judging by what he was thinking before he died, it seems like he really regrets his actions. I’m sure he didn’t really mean to run like he did. I’d guess I was pretty scary huh?” she kept on talking, feeling more, and more silly, as she continued to blather seemingly entirely to herself.

 

Amphi looked at her with a strangely hopeless expression. “...Why?” she breathed, barely even whispering. Honoko was immediately happy for her improved hearing. She undoubtedly would have missed that without it.

 

“Well, uh.” Honoko paused. This was a harder question than it should be. “Well, I just ended up here, and wanted to make sure everything still- uhm...” But that wasn’t quite right. No reason she had to use _people_ as targets for testing out her skills. Plus, she very well could have stopped when she ran out of things to test.  “Uh, well, you guys started it.” she finished lamely. That was true, but she'd literally asked for it. Plus, she sure hadn’t given them much chance to go back on that decision, even when it was clear they were no threat.

 

And while she was on that note, why was she suddenly so concerned about how this girl was feeling after she’d _personally executed all her friends_. Well, the answer to that came easily. She had nothing against the girl herself, there was no reason she would want her to be unhappy.

 

That said, the first step to not making someone unhappy is probably don’t kill people close to them.

 

“Just kill me.”

 

“Hey, y’know, it occurs to me now, that I may have been a bit hasty on the whole, uh, killing people thing.” The more she thought about it, the more obvious it became that she really should feel quite awful about all this. “It, uhm, it doesn’t exactly make me look very good, huh. Plus, it’s not like you did anything to deserve it, really.” Honestly, right now it was pretty clear who the bad guy was in this picture. And it wasn’t the teenager mourning the deaths of all her friends. How had she just... glossed over all that for a bit there? If she was still human, she was sure she’d feel something like horror, revulsion, or crushing guilt. She still didn’t feel anything like that. For whatever reason, it seemed she couldn’t empathize at all with the girl, but she did suddenly feel horrifically embarrassed, like she’d committed the mother of all faux-pas, in front of her boss and/or parents.

 

Which she had, in a sense. Literal murder would kill the atmosphere of pretty much anything at least as well as it killed the victim. At this point it was clear there wasn’t much she could do here. “Look, uh, I don’t want to leave you out in the middle of a war-zone all alone. I know you probably don’t want to deal with me, but is there --oh I dunno-- like a forward outpost, or a camp or something I can walk you to?”. Honoko stopped. Took a moment to engage her brain.  And realized she had long since passed the point of putting her foot in her mouth, and with that last sentence, had successfully found a way to wedge the thing into her small intestine.

 

” Erm. Just... Just never mind. I’ll leave you some quality gear and a bag of holding, if you want to gather everyone’s items. Should be plenty to get you wherever safely enough. I’ll just head on towards those mountains over there. The memories I took tell me they’re past the border, so I’ll go be someone else’s problem. You’ll probably never see me again, alright?” Honoko backfliped into a tree. “Uh, I really am sorry.” The words felt hollow, even to her.


End file.
